Julia and I are watching season one of FX/Direct TV's Damages. Julia has seen all four seasons; I've only seen seasons three and four; Julia thought it necessary for me to see where and how it all began.
The show centers on the relationship and working life of two very different New York high-stakes litigation lawyers: Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne), engaged when we first meet her, somewhat retiring, but focused and smart, a keen observer; and Patty Hewes, who, as written and played (by Glenn Close), remains one of the most polarizing, unlikable, memorable creations on television, a conniving games-player, shrewd, blisteringly intelligent and reptilian. Hewes isn't too much different from the powerful men she tries to bring to their knees - sneaky and corrosive, charming and vile.
But she's great fun to watch: Everything about her, in fact, is just monstrous, not the least of which her tenacity at ensnaring the financial villains that run through each of the show's first four seasons (season five, the upcoming one, will be the last): Ted Danson's grinning, beguiling huckster Arthur Frobisher, William Hurt, Lily Tomlin-Len Carious and their clan (most notably, Campbell Scott), John Goodman.
It's an extraordinary cast: from Close and Byrne and Tate Donovan to the gallery of outstanding actors that have peppered the seasons I've watched: Danson (a great villain), Zachary Booth (as Close's warped son), Zeljko Ivanec (an Emmy winner as Close's lawyer nemesis), Goodman, Peter Facinelli, Philip Bosco, Tom Noonan, the extraordinarily creepy Dylan Baker, etc.
There's a formula: each season, each episode in fact, flash-forwards about six months to a year in the present, when a main character is dead or being killed; we then go back to see what led up to this. There's more than meets than the eye, and almost every character has something to hide.
Creators Todd Kessler, Glenn Kessler, and Daniel Zelman have fashioned a first-rate show, loaded with mystery and complex characters, a deft, lurid bit of well-written storylines (all of which are relevant to the present day). Season 5 premieres mid-July, the guest stars including Ryan Phillippe, Jenna Elfman, John Hannah, and Janet McTeer (who was a fellow Oscar nominee with Close in Albert Nobbs.)
I've heard crack is addictive. Hear this: Damages might even be more addictive.
Check out this painting on permanent display in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. It's Isabella and the Pot of Basil, an 1897 work by Pittsburgh-born artist John White Alexander (1856-1915), who studied and trained in Munich, worked as a cartoonist and illustrator in New York, but truly came into his own and flowered after befriending James Whistler in Paris at the end of the 19th century and being introduced to leading members of the Symbolist movement.
He had been well-regarded in New York for his portraiture of actors and other artists, such as Oliver Wendell Holmes and Walt Whitman. In France, he began to experiment with Symbolism and Art Nouveau - slender, sinuous lines. A lot of his work had decorative and decadent themes.
The above painting was based on the 1820 poem "Isabella" by John Keats, who adapted it from a poem by Boccaccio. From the Museum of Fine Art's website:
Isabella was a Florentine merchant’s beautiful daughter whose ambitious brothers disapproved of her romance with the handsome but humbly born Lorenzo, their father’s business manager. The brothers murdered Lorenzo and told their sister that he had traveled abroad. The distraught Isabella began to decline, wasting away from grief and sadness. She saw the crime in a dream and then went to find her lover’s body in the forest. Taking Lorenzo’s head, she bathed it with her tears and finally hid it in a pot in which she planted sweet basil, a plant associated with lovers.
Gruesome stuff, huh? The painting is theatrically lit, and Isabella is sensuously-curved, almost ghostly in her attention, in a deep, reverent trance.
For all my information, thanks to: http://www.mfa.org/collections/object/isabella-and-the-pot-of-basil-31098
(brief) Book reviews:
I'm in a William Boyd groove right now. His third novel, 1984's Stars and Bars isn't his best novel by any means, but it's a funny, raucous fish-out-of-water story about an uptight, nervous British art appraiser, Henderson Dores, desperate to feel like an American. He is assigned to rural Georgia to check out an Impressionist collection owned by an eccentric millionaire and his truly strange southern clan. Even writing a light romp like this, Boyd still sheds insight (into the differences between Brits and Americans) and creates some truly original set pieces: Henderson flailing on a canoe in a luxury Atlanta hotel where the guests have to paddle across a lake to get to the elevators; and a sequence where a naked Henderson runs through the rainy after-hour streets of New York with a empty box of napkins around his torso and privates. (***)
This collection was Hemingway's second collection of short stories. It's easy to read, short, but it contains a lot of the qualities that tend to annoy me about Hemingway's style: bland characterizations, oblique plotting, repetition of adjectives and descriptions. The backdrops are mostly bullfighting and war. In short, here's a breakdown:
Really Good: "The Killers"
Good: "Fifty Grand," "Now I Lay Me," "Today is Friday"
Average or Worse: the other nine stories.
(**)
- In sports news, here's a rundown of my opinions of weekly stories:
- Ozzie Guillen: for making pro-Castro comments? Moron!
- Arkansas football coach: for fooling around (and promoting) a female intern and lying about her presence in his motorcycle accident: Moron!
- Michael Jordan's legacy by continuing to be the lackadaisical owner of the NBA's worst franchise, the Charlotte Bobcats: Tarnishing!
- the Miami Heat's odds of winning a championship this year: Diminishing!
It's never too early to think of next year's Oscars, is it?
http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/are-leonardo-dicaprio-and-vanessa-redgrave-heading-for-the-oscars-predicting-best-supporting-actor-actress-2013
http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/2012/03/02/could-bill-murray-and-keira-knightley-soon-be-oscar-winners-we-prematurely-predict-best-actor-and-actress-at-the-2013-academy-awards
So let's conjecture: For Best Actor, Bill Murray vs. Daniel Day-Lewis vs. John Hawkes
Best Actress: Keira Knightley vs. Laura Linney
Supporting Actor: Leonardo DiCaprio vs. Russell Crowe vs. Joaquin Phoenix
Supporting Actress: Vanessa Redgrave vs. Amy Adams
And:
http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/Could-The-Dark-Knight-Rises-The-Master-Be-Contenders-We-Prematurely-Predict-The-2013-Best-Picture-Oscar-Nominees
So it could be Spielberg's Lincoln vs. Affleck's Argo vs. Bigelow's Kill Bin Laden vs. Hooper's Les Miserables
It'll be interesting to see, nine months from now, if any of these early predictions bear any relevance.
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